The supremacy of the global fascist superman never became a reality but was certainly an intention. This work explores the use of the image of the male body in European, American and Asian fascism of varying degrees and various interpretations, and the differences and similarities involved.
Posted in Sports & Recreation

This is a study of masculinity as a metaphor and especially of the muscular male body as a moral symbol. It explores the Nazi's preoccupation with the male body as an icon of political power, and the ideology and theories which propelled it.
Posted in Sports & Recreation

Cultures and nations remember themselves with select bodily images, evocative rituals and texts. This volume illustrates how sport is used in the creation, maintenance and now global dissemination of a nation's cherished values. Carefully drawn cases of sport in North America - American baseball and football, figure skating and gymnastics, Canadian hockey and track and field, for example - show the potency of sport's "cultural work". The book captures uplifting images which are stressed in the public performance and national and international broadcasting of sport, but also notes the omissions and distortions of social reality that persist in sport performance and mass marketing in North America.
Posted in Sports & Recreation

Behind the spectacle of entertainment, sport is a subject with political issues at every level. These issues range from the social, with divisions created along gender and class lines, to the use of sport to pursue diplomatic and statecraft goals. In addition, some sports are positioned and promoted as national events both in public opinion and in the media. This book seeks to explore some aspects of the notion of power in sport in south Asia and among south Asians abroad. The first two chapters deal with the internal societal dimensions of the politics of sport; the next three relate to the politics inside the sporting world in the subcontinent and its bridge with the broader arena of the society through the media, while the last five relate to the use of sports in statecraft, consensus building and international politics. This book was based on two special issues of the International Journal of the History of Sport.
Posted in Sports & Recreation

The late Victorian and Edwardian officer class viewed hunting and big game hunting in particular, as a sound preparation for imperial warfare. For the imperial officer in the making, the ‘blooding’ hunting ritual was a visible ‘hallmark’ of stirling martial masculinity. Sir Henry Newbolt, the period poet of subaltern self-sacrifice, typically considered hunting as essential for the creation of a ‘masculine sporting spirit’ necessary for the consolidation and extension of the empire. Hunting was seen as a manifestation of Darwinian masculinity that maintained a pre-ordained hierarchical order of superordinate and subordinate breeds. Militarism, Hunting, Imperialism examines these ideas under the following five sections: martial imperialism: the self-sacrificial subaltern ‘blooding’ the middle class martial male the imperial officer, hunting and war martial masculinity proclaimed and consolidated martial masculinity adapted and adjusted. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.
Posted in Sports & Recreation

The field of sports history is no longer a fledgling area of study. There is a great vitality in the field and it has matured dramatically over the past decade. Reflecting changes to traditional approaches, sport historians need now to engage with contemporary debates about history, to be encouraged to position themselves and their methodologies in relation to current epistemological issues, and to promote the importance of reflecting on the literary or poetic dimensions of producing history. These contemporary developments, along with a wealth of international research from a range of theoretical perspectives, provide the backdrop to the new Routledge Companion to Sports History. This book provides a comprehensive guide to the international field of sports history as it has developed as an academic area of study. Readers are guided through the development of the field across a range of thematic and geographical contexts and are introduced to the latest cutting edge approaches within the field. Including contributions from many of the world’s leading sports historians, the Routledge Companion to Sports History is the most important single volume for researchers and students in, and entering, the sports history field. It is an essential guide to contemporary research themes, to new ways of doing sports history, and to the theoretical and methodological foundations of this most fascinating of subjects.
Posted in Sports & Recreation

Sport offers everything a good story should have: heroes and villains, triumph and disaster, achievement and despair, tension and drama. Consequently, sport makes for a compelling film narrative and films, in turn, are a vivid medium for sport. Yet despite its regularity as a central theme in motion pictures, constructions and representations of sport and athletes have been marginalised in terms of serious analysis within the longstanding academic study of films and documentaries. In this collection, it is the critical study of film and its connections to sport that are examined. The collection is one of the first of its kind to examine the ways in which sport has been used in films as a metaphor for other areas of social life. Among the themes and issues explored by the contributors are: Morality tales in which good triumphs over evil The representation and ideological framing of social identities, including class, gender, race and nationality The representation of key issues pertinent to sport, including globalization, politics, commodification, consumerism, and violence The meanings 'spoken' by films – and the various 'readings' which audiences make of them This is a timely collection that draws together a diverse range of accessible, insightful and ground-breaking new essays. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.
Posted in Performing Arts

After years of research, American syndicalist author H. R. Morgan presents a collection of the key statements made by the early Fascist leaders and their best thinkers. Included are criticisms of and solutions to all of the problems troubling the world today. Both the causes of global misery and the reasons for their having happened are plainly mentioned. The solutions are simply stated and strait forward. If you want to know why things today are the way they are, read this book. Contained within its pages is a sweeping panorama of pertinent statements made by those 'realists' of the twentieth century, that is actually, from the 1880's on up to today. "Fascism is not racism," says Morgan, "Fascism is realism." It is a doctrine of realistic social and economic policies for todays world. It is neither 'right-wing' or 'left-wing'; it is the extreme radical center. It is "thinking outside of the box" as they say. The book begins with a very informative introduction containing a large amount of historical background. It is, however, preceded with a preface of equally historical and semi biographical importance. Afterward is the main text called the 'Codex'. The 'Codex' is a long anthology of excerpts, quotes, paraphrases, citations and commentary. The book ends with a final word by Morgan. Also included is a complete bibleography and index. It is recommended for first or second year political science majors and for all those who are interested in the true meaning of Fascism for our time, rather than what they've seen and heard on television and in the mass media.
Posted in Political Science

This is an exacting social history of Indian cricket between 1780 and 1947. It considers cricket as a derivative sport, creatively adapted to suit modern Indian socio-cultural needs, fulfil political imperatives and satisfy economic aspirations. Majumdar argues that cricket was a means to cross class barriers and had a healthy following even outside the aristocracy and upper middle classes well over a century ago. Indeed, in some ways, the democratization of the sport anticipated the democratization of the Indian polity itself. Boria Majumdar reveals the appropriation, assimilation and subversion of cricketing ideals in colonial and post-colonial India for nationalist ends. He exposes a sport rooted in the contingencies of the colonial and post-colonial context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. Cricket, to put it simply, is much more than a 'game' for Indians. This study describes how the genealogy of their intense engagement with cricket stretches back over a century. It is concerned not only with the game but also with the end of cricket as a mere sport, with Indian cricket's commercial revolution in the 1930s, with ideals and idealism and their relative unimportance, with the decline of morality for reasons of realpolitik, and with the denunciation, once and for all, of the view that sport and politics do not mix. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport
Posted in Sports & Recreation

Recounts the life and career of the inventive and controversial rock musician, and includes information on his philosophies on art, his opinions on the music industry, and his thoughts on raising children.
Posted in Biography & Autobiography

This collection illustrates the expansiveness of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of sport. While rooted in anthropology, these essays consider American sports in their social, economic, cultural and political aspects, charting their evolution. The book draws from history, sociology, and political science; as well as considering the relationship between the developed and developing world; and culture and masculinity. The first part of the book considers the local and global interplay of professional baseball, covering: Major League Baseball's impact on the Dominican Republic nationalism and baseball on the Mexican/US border the globalizing forces of baseball as an industry. The second part of the book is concerned with the cultural examination of the responsiveness of masculinity to social and cultural forces, examining: the exaggerated world of bodybuilders in Southern California the cross-cultural comparisons of male behaviour on a bi-national baseball team in Mexico the historical examination of Jews in American sport. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society
Posted in Sports & Recreation

Beginning with the achievements of Mahatma Gandhi, and following the legacy of nonviolence through the struggles against Nazism in Europe, racism in America, oppression in China and Latin America, and ethnic conflicts in Africa and Bosnia, Michael Nagler unveils a hidden history. Nonviolence, he proposes, has proven its power against arms and social injustice wherever it has been correctly understood and applied. Nagler's approach is not only historical but also spiritual, drawing on the experience of Gandhi and other activists and teachers. Individual chapters include A Way Out of Hell, The Sweet Sound of Order, and A Clear Picture of Peace. The last chapter includes a five-point blueprint for change and "study circle" guide. The foreword by Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, is new to this edition.
Posted in Political Science

This book is a fascinating journey through a series of scholarly articles. The journey begins by tracing one of the most significant stories in the popularization of Association Football. In the next leg of the journey it charts the diverse and changing face of the modern British game. It then moves on to the global spread of the game from England and its domestication and appropriation in its new homes across the planet. It also investigates the exchanges which are increasingly taking place between these new homes of football. In the concluding pieces footballâe(tm)s global experience is compared with the attempts at globalizing baseball and drawing out the larger patterns that inform footballâe(tm)s global experience. This book was published as a special issue in Soccer and Society.
Posted in Sports & Recreation

Managing the Body explores the emergence of modern male and female bodies within the context of debates about racial fitness and active citizenship in Britain from the 1880s until 1939. It analyses the growing popularity of hygienic regimen or body management such as dietary restrictions, exercise, sunbathing, dress reform, and birth control to cultivate beauty, health, and fitness. These bodily disciplines were advocated by a loosely connected group of life reform and physical culture promoters, doctors, and public health campaigners against the background of rapid urbanization, the rise of modern lifestyles, a proliferation of visual images of beautiful bodies, and eugenicist fears about racial degeneration. The author shows that body management was an essential aspect of the campaign for national efficiency before 1914. The modern nation state needed physically efficient, disciplined citizens and the promotion of hygienic practices was an integral component of the Edwardian welfare reforms. Anxieties about physical deterioration persisted after the First World War, as demonstrated by the launch of new pressure groups that aimed to transform Britain from a C3 to an A1 nation. These military categories became a recurrent metaphor throughout the interwar years and the virtuous habits of the healthy and fit A1 citizen were juxtaposed with those of the C3 anti-citizen, whose undisciplined lifestyle was attributed to ignorance and lack of self-control. Practices such as vegetarianism, nudism, and men's dress reform were utopian and appealed only to a small minority, but sunbathing, hiking, and keep-fit classes became mainstream activities and they were promoted in the National Government's 'National Fitness Campaign' of the late 1930s.
Posted in History

The 2008 Olympic Games will be held in Beijing, but many human rights activists support a boycott. They liken the circumstances to previous governments that used the games to glorify their regimes--most notoriously the Nazis in 1936. What has led to this perception and is it fair? Sport, Revolution and the Beijing Olympicsis a cultural history of sport in China that challenges many such ingrained Western assumptions. The authors unpick the relationship of sport to imperialism and revolution and examine its significance in both China and Taiwan at governmental and everyday levels. In the process they successfully debunk harmful myths, such as the prevalence of drugs in Chinese sport among women athletes, and present a balanced view that is a much-needed corrective to popular understanding.
Posted in History

This strikingly original book examines how sport and ideas of physicality have shaped the politics and culture of modern Laos. Viewing the country's extraordinary transitions--from French colonialism to royalist nationalism to revolutionary socialism to the modern development state--through the lens of physical culture, Simon Creak's lively and incisive narrative illuminates a nation that has no reputation in sport and is typically viewed, even from within, as a country of cheerful but lazy people. Creak argues that sport and related physical practices--including physical education, gymnastics, and military training--have shaped a national consciousness by locating it in everyday experience. These practices are popular, participatory, performative, and, above all, physical in character and embody ideas and ideologies in a symbolic and experiential way. Embodied Nation takes readers on a brisk ride through more than a century of Lao history, from a nineteenth-century game of tikhi--an indigenous game resembling field hockey--to the country's unprecedented outpouring of nationalist sentiment when hosting the 2009 Southeast Asian Games. En route, we witness a Lao-Vietnamese soccer brawl in 1936, the fascist-inspired body ethic of the early 1940s, the novel modes of military masculinity that blossomed with national independence, the spectacular state theatrics of power represented by Olympic-inspired sports festivals, and the high hopes and frequent failures of socialist sport in the 1970s and 1980s. Of central concern in Creak's narrative are the twin motifs of gender and civilization. Despite increasing female participation since the early twentieth century, he demonstrates the major role that sport and physical culture have played in forming hegemonic masculinities in Laos. Even with limited national sporting success--Laos has never won an Olympic medal--the healthy, toned, and muscular form has come to symbolize material development and prosperity. Embodied Nation outlines the complex ways in which these motifs, through sport and physical culture, articulate with state power. Combining cultural and intellectual history with historical thick description, Creak draws on a creative array of Lao and French sources from previously unexplored archives, newspapers, and magazines, and from ethnographic writing, war photography, and cartoons. More than an "imagined community" or "geobody," he shows that Laos was also a "body at work," making substantive theoretical contributions not only to Southeast Asian studies and history, but to the study of the physical culture, nationalism, masculinity, and modernity in all modern societies.
Posted in History

“Fascism” has become a term of general derision and rebuke. It is tossed casually in the direction of anything a critic happens to dislike.

But fascism is a real political and economic concept, not a stick with which to beat opponents arbitrarily. The abuse of this important word undermines its true value as a term referring to a very real phenomenon, and one whose spirit lives on even now.

Fascism is a specific ideology based on the idea that the state is the ideal organization for realizing a society’s and an individual’s potential economically, socially, and even spiritually.

The state, for the fascist, is the instrument by which the people’s common destiny is realized, and in which the potential for greatness is to be found. Individual rights, and the individual himself, are strictly subordinate to the state’s great and glorious goals for the nation. In foreign affairs, the fascist attitude is reflected in a belligerent chauvinism, a contempt for other peoples, and a society-wide reverence for soldiers and the martial virtues.

Lew Rockwell, in this new volume, examines the starkly contrasting systems of capitalism and fascism, noting pro-fascist trends in recent decades as well as the larger historical trends in the United States and internationally.

In Section One, Rockwell focuses on the nature of fascism and its influence in Western society, with a focus on American political and economic institutions.

In Section Two, Rockwell examines capitalism as the enemy of, and antidote to fascism.

Combining economics, history, and political philosophy, this book doesn’t just provide a diagnosis of what ails American and Western society, but also sheds light on how we might repair the damage that has been done, and with the help of the intellectual work of great minds like Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul, we might as a society shed the fascism of our times and look to freedom instead.

This book examines how sexual politics, specifically those surrounding the modernization of a consumer economy, are key to understanding the transformation of Spain from isolated dictatorship to modern state. It focuses on issues concerning modernity and the commodification of the female body under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in the 1950s and 1960s. These two decades are critical to understanding this transformation because they coincide with the opening of markets, the freer movement of people in and out of the country through tourism and emigration, and the embracing of the "American way of life" popularized in Hollywood movies. From a gender perspective this "in between moment" in Homi Bhabha's terms, from autarchy to consumerism favored the transition from the virginal female model, prescribed by the regime, (what the author calls "True Catholic Womanhood") to a seductive modern woman that the media sold to Spanish women. This study will add a significant piece to the growing corpus of literature on the body as an essential element of analysis in gender history and in the power dynamics of culture. It will help to fill a gap in the field of Spanish Cultural Studies in general and the emerging field of cultural Spanish history in particular. The originality of this study resides in Dr. Morcillo's use of feminist theories of the body to study archival sources of the Francoist years. Of special interest are the collections of Ministry of Culture and Administrative papers Women's Section of Falange at the Archivo General de la Administracion in Alcala de Henares. Also important are the works of intellectuals of the period, as well as health books, maternity and hygiene guides, conduct manuals, and documents produced by the Catholic Church hierarchy with regard to moral behavior and sexual mores that provide a textured analysis of gender relations under the dictatorship. The author's interest in unveiling the regime's technologies of control of ordinary Spaniards is covered through the study of the media, printed press, and the movie industry of this period particularly the so-called New Spanish Cinema inaugurated in the 1960s, illustrating how ads and films shaped and contested the regime's vision of modernity and gender roles. Through the production of dual versions of films the censorship process utilized women's cinematic bodies to present a more liberal image of Spain in the international scene. While nudity was allowed in the international versions the domestic productions continued to cut the customary kiss. The economy of desire displayed in today's Almodovar's films is already present in movies like La Tia Tula by Miguel Picazo (1964). This book will be essential for scholars and students interested in Ibero-American cultural studies, gender, religion, and totalitarian politics.
Posted in History

When first published, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century.
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